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MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent
mjeppsen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America is turning a blind eye towards movie piracy on Usenet, going after torrent link sites instead. PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA, who is also shilling downloadable movies for the MPAA at a premium price."
Ethay irstfay uleray ofway ethay usenetway isway ouyay oday otnay alktay aboutway ethay usenetway.
liqbase
The article misses a major point.
The MPAA is perfectly free to choose who to go after. If they choose to allow GUBA to continue (at least for now), that is their right. It doesn't take away from their valid position to protect their copyrights.
As an aside, I had never heard of GUBA before this. I may have to look into it...
You do not talk about Usenet.
It's just easier to find and sue torrent abusers.
because I was starting to get the impression they were a little too focused on all the great music they were putting out lately.
I'd never heard of GUBA, but I'm real curious how they "index" multimedia that's got names like "4er0s1x03.rar" (that's "Heros, season 1 episode 3" for the unitiated). People name things like that to avoid getting caught by *AA filter bots. Seriously, how can they index all that stuff with all those cute non-machine-readable names?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Hadn't heard of this before. The wiki page calls this "a video hosting service similar to YouTube. It also sells and rents videos in Windows Media DRM restricted formats. It was founded in 1998 as a Usenet service provider."
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
So the MPAA Are behaving in a way that possibly harms the MPAA and nobody else. Why should we bully them into behaving differently?
Is it a crime to be stupid?
Because if they *had* sued this "Guba" thing, you idiots would be congratulating them for their meticulous fairness and consistency and expressing relief that they hadn't "lost the moral high ground" by failing to take legal action against someone...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So right there, Guba has some sort of DRM system in place that keeps people from just watching any movie at any time - and since they use the Usenet archives at times to snag their movies, the MPAA doesn't have to worry about "clean" copies - they'll still get paid for crappy Usenet archive copies that Joe Geek ripped from the DVD.
But there's something else that Guba offers as well: tracking of content. Does Hollywood want to know what movie might be a good pick? What if there's been a lot of traffic in "Santa Claus versus the Martians", and it's pretty constant - maybe rereleasing the DVD will make some cash.
Either way, the selective nature of just what the MPAA will go after and what they won't is rather interesting. I read through the artcle which seemed to show pretty clearly that the MPAA can ignore copyright violation when it wants to. Anyone else have a better idea than I why that may be?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I think the due diligence requirement you're speaking of only applies to trademark. With copyright, your awareness and failure-to-sue some other guilty party could conceivably be brough up in court as a defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)
But I don't think this defense works very often. The copyright holder could basically say "we have to use our resources sparingly; there's so much infringement out there that we can't bring cases except where there's a very good chance of winning"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
You do not talk about Usenet.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Bittorrent is more or less centralized. Centralized targets are easy to shutdown and pillage.
Usenet is decentralized and distributed. It would be very hard to deal with. So this is just a matter of the MPAA/RIAA picking the low hanging fruits. Governments had trouble censoring Usenet, the MPAA/RIAA aren't going to do much better.
The easy money is going after the centralized servers and then getting the big ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet. First, steer people away from the clients. If they don't know that it exists, they don't get the service. Second, stop providing clients. That raises the bar even further. So no NNTP client from the ISPs, and I bet MS Windows doesn't even ship with a program that can handle NNTP either. Even ten years ago, back when people were constantly fiddling with their computers, something like 65% kept the default programs and configurations, the percentage must be much higher nowadays. Lastly, when their Usenet usage drops enough, they can quietly pull the plug.
Since as a side effect of being distributed and decentralized, Usenet is dreadfully difficult to track or censor or charge extra for. The largest ISPs are owned by MPAA/RIAA interests anyway and not being able to charge extra rubs them the wrong way. So, these interests steer people instead to Facebook, MySpace, and other ad revenue generators. Many western governments appear to have issues with free flow of information, and especially troubled by sources that are difficult to censor. Remember, Usenet got around blocks that even seasoned reporters couldn't when covering dramatic events like the fall of eastern block governments or even China's Tienamen Square massacre.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
If (when) the One Laptop Per Child project takes, of then the mesh network will need a new communications network with many of the characteristics of Usenet. HTTP just is not practical over slow, intermittent connections, so without a distributed, decentralized communications system, mesh users are cut out of web forums and such. Even e-mail is difficult if several of the nodes between you and your correspondents are frequently down or out of contact.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Comcast is partnered with Giganews, does that make it ok to download TV shows then? ;)
.info realm, and (when I used windows) a program called "grabit" which offered integrated search that apparently is maintained by the software creators (i.e. no header download), but is only functional for a subscription fee.
Seriously though, the real difference between the two (at least when it comes to finding movies and other *AA offensive material) is the ease (or lack thereof) with which it can be found by the average Joe.
Having been on Usenet for some time, finding one episode out of the many legit postings, spam, incomplete files, bad encodings, etc... is a real hassle and PITA. Try finding a posting that was left say... 58 days ago, when dealing with large files (like a 4.6 GB movie in multiple parts) and the number of headers you have to download and sort becomes quite a time consuming chore. In my experience, I have only found 2 *good* ways of finding content easily on Usenet. 1 is a serach engine in the
With BT, there's plenty of sites out there that offer well indexed, and decently maintained search listings for torrents so that the average user (savvy enough to install a BT client and run it anyways) can find and download pretty much anything on a whim.
What makes usenet nice (and a peripheral threat to *AA), is fast downloads, and retention. A torrent might die off or significantly drop in speed/peers/seeds after 3-7 days, stuff on usenet (depending on your provider) has retention of 70 days+, and you're only limited to your download cap on your account (unless you know of a free provider). What makes it bad, is the lack of an easy reliable search mechanism.
The MPAA partnering with GUBA, seems to me, a way for the MPAA to put a spin on usenet akin to putting up a 2 ft fence to keep out an 8ft gorilla.
PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA
GUBA!!! You said I was the only one...
I think the MPAA doesn't care about Usenet is because the Usenet that is provied "free" by ISP's sux in a major way. Anyone with Earthlink or TimeWarner can confirm that even with PAR2 files, there is simply not enough left of just about any rar to reassemble the archive. Too many pieces just disappear.
I guess GigaNews still isn't big enough to attract the attention of the MPAA. I hope GigaNews wouldn't give up the user's data without a fight anyway.
Also, one person posts on usenet and there are many free "anonymous" posting servers out there. Several people download. Getting the uploaders is more important to the RI/MP-AA than the leachers/lurkers. With bittorrent, nearly eveyone who downloads also uploads so all users are just as guilty.
Finally, the IP addresses of the users are easier to find via torrent than they are via usenet.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I've been wondering for quite a while why mpaa has never bothered about bittorrent. Then youtube came around and I just assume that the mpaa would be trying to dig its talons into that, instead. Guess I was wrong.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do not know about the inner workings of the standard extensions to Bittorrent. Don't feel bad; most people don't.
.torrent container or tracker -- just give your DHT-enabled Bittorrent client (say, Azureus) a magnet link and a starter peer and it will retrieve metadata and content for you without any centralized organization. No tracker, no .torrent. Perfectly legal to distribute magnet links, and perfectly legal to distribute Azureus.
Bittorrent was designed to be as decentralized as possible. Usenet still has to be hosted on servers of one kind or another; Bittorrent shares are distributed by a system of peers. The distributed database system means that Bittorrent metadata does not even need a
PS FYI, there is at least one client installed with Windows XP capable of handling NNTP -- Outlook Express. Also, Google still has most of the worthwhile news groups.
~ C.
The Usenet as an MPAA profit center? I don't buy it.
So, there's no way that if the MPAA knows the full scope of the Usenet, that they would be making enough money off of GUBA to offset the perceived losses of keeping the Usenet in operation.
Here's a better explanation: to crack down on the Usenet, the MPAA would have to put pressure on the ISPs who provide Usenet connectivity as part of their plans. ISPs don't like reducing the value of their services by limiting features (it makes it harder to justify their monthly rate hikes). And the MPAA needs to be friendly with the ISPs to keep getting those juicy log files.
So it's not that they like the Usenet, it's just that they don't have a way to shut it off, yet.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
The main distinguishing feature of Bittorrent, and all the other mainstream P2P networks, is they all have nice shiny GUI-based clients. All your average Internet user needs is to hear from their token nerd friend "download blahblahwindowsclient.exe from this site, double-click it, and click yes to everything" and they're up and running with a dead-easy piracy scheme.
Usenet piracy, however, still requires a bit of fiddling with to get working. You need to choose and install a client. You need to set it up with your server's settings. You need to learn about binaries, how to rejoin split files, how to use RAR archives, how to recreate missing parts by using multiple servers or fiddling with PAR2s, and so on.. and that's just to leech. If you want to contribute, there's another whole list of things you need to learn how to do to make usable posts.
There's also the fact that everyone's a target with P2P. If you're leeching, you're also sharing with others, your IP is out there, and you're counted among the trackable. One file can possibly lead to hundreds or thousands of guilty trraders for the **AA to prosecute. On Usenet the only ones they can go after are the posters, and one successfully posted file can be grabbed by a virtually unlimited number of downloaders before it vanishes from the ether forever.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I thought I was going to get sued by the MPAA for piracy, but I only got 98% of the document before all my connections dropped. Oh well.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
There is another low-hanging fruit issue: you can never prevent all of the piracy for something and really, to have a measurable business effect, you don't have to. You just have to continue to make it more difficult for the vast majority of the world (i.e. doesn't read Slashdot, thinks AJAX is a brand of household cleaner, pirates things because its free, easy, and safe) to get to your content. And forcing casual users to have to understand arcane stuff about newsgroups, binaries, multi-part archives, and filename obfuscation raises the piracy bar a lot higher than "OK, Google this program called Azureus. They have a search box, you take it from there."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Usenet is definitely big, but the problem (or maybe the reason it's still around) is that many people find it a lot harder to use than BT.
Generally -- at least in the good 'ol days -- Usenet was a service that you got from your ISP. Along with x many email addresses and everything else, ISPs would advertise their Usenet breadth and retention. A good ISP would have its own servers that would mirror the popular newsgroups and retain articles for a set length of time, usually 90 days.
As the size of the newsgroups grew and grew (a 90-day cache must be up in the petabyte range now), and its popularity with average readers waned, fewer ISPs kept good feeds. Now, if you want a really good newsfeed, you may have to pay for it, or you're going to have to do some research on your ISP's web page to figure out how to access theirs, and what groups they have and what their retention rate is. Some ISPs don't carry the binary groups, or have short retention spans.
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
The WP article on Usenet is fairly good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does the MPAA control TV shows, too? I have no interest in downloading full theater movies or DVD rips, but I'll grab tonight's CSI off the 'bay sometime tomorrow because my DVR is busy recording other things. Plus the shows off torrents are HD, with commercials pre-cut, so it's awesome. Where do those fit in?
This is why everybody who torrents should be using Azureus or uTorrent and enabling RC5 end-to-end encryption.
It doesn't matter whether or not what you're downloading is legal or not under our messed up copyright system. It is simply a message saying "we're not going to let you stifle legitimate technologies because 'they might be used for piracy'". In fact, let's have everybody enable RC5 end-to-end encryption, and then keep trading Ubuntu images and other legal stuff back and forth.
This, of course, can't stop them from attacking torrent trackers, but I'm sure the whole "not being in the USA" thing will help many of them.
I agee with most of what you have to say... .nzb files this year and if anything, with more newsreaders being able to hand nzb's, I feel like it will become easier for users in general to participate in Usenet, and we'll see an expansion in the number of people on there.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
I disagree that there are problems with its' design, in that, it's lasted this long, and from everything I know about it (dating back to the late 80's) people have always been proclaiming it's death or that so and so is going to eventually pull the plug on it. The fact that it's decentralized, and anyone with a spare computer could set up a server to, at the very least "repeat" what's carried by larger servers, is the very thing that will keep it running long after web2.0 dies a horrible death when "the next big thing" comes along.
I recently discovered
...if this is your first time on Usenet, YOU will upload pr0n
Lets be honest, the real reason they aren't going after it is that usenet is little known outside of IT circles and is pretty user unfriendly (at least to a layman).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I went and looked for this "Usenet" of which the article speaks. And I found it.
While in my extensive research, I found no MPAA content.
Perhaps I was sidetracked by all the boobies.
Yes, but unless there's some darknet-capable BT protocol that I'm not aware of, when you start downloading a file, you expose your IP address to everyone that you're grabbing parts of the file from. Any one of them could be a government/MPAA/RIAA spy.
So if I want to find a bunch of would-be copyright infringers, or opposition journalists, or whatever, all I need to do is create a file with an enticing name (say, "tiananmen_square.mpg" or "TheLionKing.avi"), fill it with garbage data, and toss it out in a likely place where people will see it and start downloading. As soon as they connect, you've got their IP. Ask/subpoena/rubber-hose their ISP for the billing records, and cue the men with guns.
With a Usenet or Usenet-like system, an individual user is only ever connecting to one server. It's centralized, but there's also more trust. You're never exposing your IP address -- and thus your identity, because the two are effectively one and the same when the government or another entity can force your ISP to reveal it -- to any unknown or untrusted people.
In a really paranoid environment, Usenet can be compartmentalized; you would pull the feed from the person directly above you in your hierarchy, and they would pass traffic to someone else above them, without you knowing who the upstream provider is. If the network gets compromised at the bottom, it's a rather painstaking process to follow the traffic up in order to get the rest of the network. Rather than being able to grab a lot of users at once, you can only get one "cell" at a time, if it's being run as a darknet.
Usenet seems more centralized on the surface, but in some ways it's far less so. Perhaps its security is mostly accidental rather than by design, but it can survive in situations that are highly adverse to the free flow of information, while BitTorrent basically assumes that a high percentage (all?) of the people you're exchanging traffic with are friendly, and that your IP address is OK to give out.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Where have you been?
There are providers of Usenet feeds that have made the whole process point-and-click. One of them (they're a real "easy news" provider!), you literally open up a web browser and go to their URL, log in, and start downloading. They even are nice enough to UnRAR the files for you and automatically reassemble PARs (PAR is designed to fix the 'missing hunk' problem using techniques similar to RAID 5), so you get a nice AVI file, mp3, iso, or whatever you are trying to get.
And, as TFA pointed out, that's exactly what GUPA is doing as well. One-click to download one of 18 ST:Voyager episodes.
Who didn't get the memo? Christ.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Newshosting offers 70 days retention for $20/month (45 days for $15/month), unlimited downloads and maxes out my 6Mbps line. I know there is at least one or two other providers with similar retentions (but possibly higher prices and/or limited Gigs/month)
> You do not talk about Usenet.
1. You do not talk about Usenet.
2. You *do* *not* *talk* *about* *Usenet*.
3. You *do* *not* *post* *in* *HTML*.
Usenet and IRC have long been major distribution routes for "illegal content" on the internet, more technically savvy people probably get content off of the newsgroups and irc each day than have ever gotten it off of bittorrent... faster generally too... bittorrents big bonus is... it's stupid easy, click the link wait a few hours.
Shadus
From a time before binaries and spam were rampant comes a far-reaching and informative paper entitled Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal And Political Future of Alt.Sex.Stories
And here is a relevant quote:
"Generally speaking, government regulation in this country seems to be most effective only when dealing with large, centralized entities (such as corporations). These entities need to pay taxes, file documents, utilize the courts, etc. These entities are also willing to put up with a number of impositions because of their overriding interest in attaining profits. However, when we are dealing with an entity that is not driven by profits and a decentralized activity that has no real controlling agent (i.e., the Usenet), the regulatory system seems to break down. The only channel of consequence to the Usenet is one of existence. Its demolition (perhaps the only real regulation available) would be a regrettable loss to society.[ 59 ]
Moreover, even though banning the structure of the Usenet could technically be instituted in the U.S., its center of gravity would most likely shift abroad and be imported through Telnet or other methods. In that case, as with any undesirable overseas activity, a customs system could be established if there was a strong enough governmental interest. However, such a system would pose a huge burden to the international flow of information. Certainly, the argument could be made that the U.S., in implementing such an Internet customs system, might be crippling itself economically for the commerce of the future.
Finally, one should note that the regulation of the Usenet by foreign nations can potentially affect Usenet services in this country. For example, a German prosector in Munich ordered CompuServe to discontinue service of over 200 "alt.sex" and related newsgroups on charges that they contained illegal pornographic material. [ 60 ] Since CompuServe lacked the technical means with which to tailor Usenet content simply for German subscribers, the company blocked access to these newsgroups for all of its subscribers worldwide. [ 61 ] Although CompuServe corrected its technical problem within a matter of weeks, the incident received tremendous criticism domestically. [ 62 ] One source even characterized the event as "the most dramatic and far-reaching attempt to restrict the free flow of information online." [ 63 ]"
All that and I still firmly believe that the only reason USENET hasn't been shut down is because its too good a source of leads for catching Child Abusers/Child Pornographers -- if USENET went away then those criminals would just be driven further underground and would be harder to catch-- plus, thanks to USENET, the FBI/et al can maintain a regular series of arrests by simply perusing USENET every now and then, finding someone who hasn't masked themselves well enough and arrest them.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
>usenet is little known outside of IT circles
There is no shortage of trolls and morons on USENET, not all of whom are "in IT circles."
I'm afraid the cat's been out of the bag for a long, long time.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
There might be a trademark issue, but copyright only applies to the content.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
It is quite obvious, the movie companies OWN the usenet host companies.. Their plan is to make every file sharing app and platform illegal except for usenet, they are just pushing out the competition. Sue the mpaa for monopolization? ya, I'd say so..
Usenet is full of movies, games, software and mp3s. Small downloads like mp3s are very easy to get...but still are loads of full version softwares available (par files sometimes are needed to complete a set, but in my experience that only happens 2 out of 5 times)
It does require that you check daily and download immediately, since retention on most ISP's news
service doesn't last for more than a day or two.
It would be harder to monitor because all news services get feeds from all the other news services,
kinda makes it hard to find the original poster.
Doubtful, you just have a crappy news server...it is that simple...get an account with Giganews or Supernews and you will see a great difference. I am using RoadRunner and although it is not the best, there is plenty on there.
I am not going to tell anyone what I have gotten off usenet, but it spans at least 200 CDs...the content is there for the taking.
When a movie/music files/whatever posted to Usenet, there is only one distributor/publisher of the questionable content. When someone downloads questionable content via BitTorrent, they are simultaneously taking on the role of downloader and distributor/publisher. If the *AA wants to go after those distributing/illegitimiately publishing their content, they'll find a lot more potential targets for litigation. Even if they went after individual Usenet servers who carry the groups and posts containing copyrighted material, the pool of BitTorrent users is simply larger.
Also, these days, I'd wager that there are more simply people downloading via BitTorrent than binaries newsgroups, given the lower learning curve and generally faster download speeds.
Like I said, that requires paying money, something the people hitting up Bittorrent sites aren't all that willing to do.
http://www.guba.com/watch/3000020991?featured=free _home&pp=10&sb=8&set=5&o=5&sample=1161271793:a93a1 f0602ec290b1ef0b032c0058df783efc4bb
you mean people don't open a tab to type their wittiosities and compulsively refresh the first tab to make sure they haven't been beaten to the chase?
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I'm surpised how many people don't know about the great Web-based newsreaders out there. Guba is awesome. You even get previews of clis done in flash so you can see if it's what you are looking for, and they combine all the files into one downloadable file. Those services are great, and much better than the torrents in some ways.
Not only is it not illegal, but the RIAA and MPAA have been paying companies to "poison" filesharing servers like this for a long time now. If you download and install Kazaa Lite and type in the name of any remotely popular song, you'll get hundreds of matches of all sizes and lengths, and a vast majority of them are fake. Kazaa themselves rendered their service almost unusable with all their adware, but the glut of false files did the rest of the job.
The first rule of Slashdot is that we don't talk about Usenet.
And it's quite possible someone here may give you a Chinese burn for mentioning NNTP.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Isn't that the same sor of question as "Is it illegal for me to sell naked pictures of myself as a child"?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What is this "use net" everyone's talking about? I use the net every day....
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
I wish you people would stop talking about usenet!
P.S. This posting pause thing is getting ridiculous. It says I only waited 16 seconds after posting... my last post was last night!
The MPAA and such may not be going after the RIAA its self but they sure arn't ignoring usenet. They have been going after NZB sharing sites like nzbzone and dvdr site.
"Usenet? What Usenet? I dunno any Usenet. How 'bout youse guys? Youse ever heard of a "Usenet?" Sorry, officer, no Usenet here. We run a clean carting business here. Right, Guido?"
internet birthdate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET
or
The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational by 1 January 1983
usenet birhdate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979.
or
It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year,
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The really neat thing about USENET is the higher quality of downloads and public reported (via replies) if something has a virus. Perhaps because people have to pay for it, the kiddies aren't all there.
Then again, i use USENET mostly for tech newsgroups. My job would be that much harder without the wealth of material. Torrents can be shut down without too much adverse affects, no so for USENET.
Have you read my journal today?
Azureus supports Tor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion_Router
I've tried to explain how to access usenet to several friends, some of them pretty computer savvy. None of them really understood how to use it. Plus they didn't like the fact that what they were searching for probably wasn't there and they would have to post a request and/or check back regularly. They wanted more instant results. I've also noticed that the files on usenet seem to have much better quality than other sources (at least the files I'm looking for).
The problem for the MPAA is that Usenet providers have been deemed to be 17 USC 512(a) service providers. That means they can't be successfully sued for copyright infringement for material traversing their networks, and they need not even respond to takedown notices for such material. Yep, it's their own law, the DMCA, working against them. Though before that law, the Netcom case left them pretty hamstrung anyway.
You should not use Bittorrent with Tor, no matter how enticing or appropriate a use it may seem -- Tor is made up of a large network of volunteer nodes all communicating with each other in mostly a "mesh" fashion; this kind of topology and the average bandwidth of nodes does not survive well under the kind of load BT puts on it. If you want Tor to survive for its intended purpose (legitimate anonymity), please don't use its resources for illegitimate reasons (hiding your identity because you're doing some illegal/unethical, i.e., piracy).
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
Back arround that time, people used to joke that we could defete the Soviet empire cheaper by dropping Toshiba LapTops loaded with Unix than by building bombs and bombers, everyone in Russia could have gotten a laptop for what we were paying for B1 bombers and Hydrogen bombs! The only problem would have been the weight of the manuals would have killed anyone that they were dropped on. If you really want to move data anonymously even today dial-up UUCP networks between trusted nodes and GnuPG is the way to go!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Excuse, me but encryption doesn't have any effect. If they want to collect the IP addresses of people downloading their music, they just have to join the torrent - being encrypted buys you nothing, unless you think your ISP is spying for the MPAA.
Okay, Time Warner charges it's RoadRunner cable modem customers $45 a month for unlimited hi-speed access. If you're only going to surf the web, chat and email, all you need is their competitor's $25 DSL service. But if you are going to download dozens of movies and TV show episodes every week through the binary newsgroups, you need that speed.
In essence, Time Warner is charging $20/month for all-you-can-watch, DRM-free access to current movies and TV shows. And we happily pay it. They've already proven that this is the business model that works, they should just go ahead and market it.
4. If you must talk about Usenet, call it Google Groups.
Usenet for the moment remains under the radar for a variety of reasons. First off, the **AA tends to pursue a certain type of infringement. Basically, they go after the average Joe. The one that can't afford a lawsuit, and the one that will relate well with most everyone else. Hope to inspire some of the "if it happened to him, it could happen to me" lines of thought.
Usenet also has a bit of a learning curve. ISP newsservers for the most part are a crapshoot, so if you actually intend to USE it, you'll have to find a commercial usenet server and purchase an account. That's one more monthly bill to pay, as opposed to the P2P programs which are typically free. You'll have to find and learn (and sometimes purchase) some decent newsreader software that can handle the binary attachments with ease, as well as learn the
archiving schemes typical to usenet (rar, pars, etc). That added complexity tends to keep the majority of people off. And that's a good thing if you ask me.
There's also the difficulty in tracking a usenet downloader. On all the P2P programs, you need only monitor the data stream or design your own client to sniff addresses and offerings of multitudes of people using the service. With usenet, the only information about a file you can gather is the hostname of the individual who posted it
originally, and if they are smart, that will have been proxied. The usenet servers might maintain records of
downloads, but that information will be hard to come by, and a lot harder to use as useful evidence. They could go after the servers themselves, but those are typically owned and managed by corporations that can afford lawyers, and therefore don't make easy targets.
When it comes down to it, everyone's heard of bittorrent, and kaaza, and if you're reading in the newspaper about 1000 college students getting busted for using it, it will at least get everyone's attention. A similar report about 1000 usenet users getting busted will just result in a bunch of people going "what's this usenet thing? and where can I download it?"
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
so I guess it depends on one's definition of what Internet is then in determining which came before.
It bothers me that the only time that Usenet is brought up anymore on sites like this is in regards to the binary content on Usenet. Yes, alt.binaries.* exists, and it's 99.9% of Usenet's traffic; but the text-based groups still exist, and they're doing pretty well lately, especially with our new Big-8 newsgroup creation system. But it's difficult-to-impossible to publicize this through discussion fora such as Slashdot, which aren't interested in the old, less-catchy systems of yesteryear...
If anybody is any good at publicity and wants to help with Usenet, give me a mail.
My assumption was that if you were creating such a darknet, you wouldn't leave something quite so obvious as a Path header in place. Or at least not one that contained any personally identifying information of the servers above yours. At each step in the hierarchy, a server would strip out the header entries from the servers above it, and would only pass down information about itself.
Or maybe rather than stripping the Path headers, it could encrypt the Path header before adding itself to it. So if a message came back to the server, it could decrypt the path and get the next server up in the hierarchy. It wouldn't be able to read further up than that, because the remainder of the path is encrypted with the upstream server's key. (This would also have the advantage of not allowing a key compromise of an upstream server to immediately compromise all of the downstream servers, since having an upstream key wouldn't let you take a far downstream message's path and decrypt all of it -- the full path would have layers of encryption on it.)
So if I'm an end-user named Joe, and I get my news from a server called Frank, and he gets his news from a server called Sam, the Path header that I see would be:
Path: Frank![encrypted gibberish]
However, if Frank was looking at the same message, he'd be able to decrypt the next level up in the path, so he'd see:
Path: Frank!Sam![encrypted gibberish]
But he wouldn't be able to go any higher, because the remainder of the path would be encrypted with Sam's key.
Also, you'd obviously need to transfer all the data between nodes using encryption, and all messages would need digital signatures (since you, an end user, couldn't know how the message would reach its destination readers).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I understood that Usenet was one of the original constituent parts of the Internet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
which came first. internet or usenet
?
(hint, the answer is above)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
... and is pretty user unfriendly ...
Usenet is as user unfriendly as e-mail or http. You only need a nice client and it becomes really easy. I.e.: http://www.panic.com/unison/
A little warning would be nice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.